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DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

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Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#161

Post by alchemism »

strken wrote: post #138
caymanjim wrote: post #137

DevOps absolutely existed when the author started as a developer. It was just called systems administration back then. There's been a focus on developer-specific systems administration over the past decade, and a particular developer-focused role has been carved out and labeled "DevOps", but make no mistake: it is systems administration. Just a niche within it. When I mention "systems administration" to younger cowor…

When I hear systems administration I assume it's pets not cattle, and that you're administering individual named servers with bash scripts rather than administering a mesos cluster with chef or puppet or whatever. I'm not sure where I picked up this impression from.

It comes from bright, talented SWEs who do not, bless their hearts, understand that IT Operations is an entire profession unto its own, and not merely the grunt-work they are forced to do while working as interns or juniors.

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#162

Post by alchemism »

noknownsender wrote: post #156
caymanjim wrote: post #137

DevOps absolutely existed when the author started as a developer. It was just called systems administration back then. There's been a focus on developer-specific systems administration over the past decade, and a particular developer-focused role has been carved out and labeled "DevOps", but make no mistake: it is systems administration. Just a niche within it. When I mention "systems administration" to younger cowor…

So I should probably talk to HR about changing my title from Systems Administrator to something more in vogue?

In all seriousness, you will see a 50-90% salary increase if you do, albeit at your next job site, perhaps.

(Speaking pithily as a sysadmin-turned-DevOps-turned-SRE doing vaguely the same work for far more money...)

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#163

Post by alchemism »

dogprez wrote: post #109
irrational wrote: post #18

This article was frustrating to me. When it started out in the mid-90s (which is when I started my career also), I thought our experiences would be more aligned. However, I've never worked with an operations team. In all the places I've worked I've been expected to do everything from setting up servers (originally physical servers, later cloud servers), hardening them, installing software, optimizing the software, in…

The article is lost on me too. ~15 years professional experience as a software developer and I never had to deal with an "Operations" team. My understanding is that it's the people that would be doing Amazon's job if you were trying to not use AWS or some other cloud service? "Devops" means not fighting with those people??? haha

I take it you’ve never worked in any of the Fortune 500, then.

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#164

Post by RichardCA »

caymanjim wrote: post #137

DevOps absolutely existed when the author started as a developer. It was just called systems administration back then. There's been a focus on developer-specific systems administration over the past decade, and a particular developer-focused role has been carved out and labeled "DevOps", but make no mistake: it is systems administration. Just a niche within it. When I mention "systems administration" to younger cowor…

Being a "Build-Release Engineer", essentially the sysadmin of the development tool chain, has existed since at least the 90's.

But the roots can be traced to the 70's (the PDP-11 had the compile-link process).

If you were really smart and could program in Assembler they called you a "Systems Programmer".

In the 80's, the PC revolution fostered debates over how much centralized control IT should have.

There was a long-standing debate in computing as to where the software should live (that is on a server or at the client level).

This debate was settled when Google invested heavily in making the browser a powerful and stable platform (think about Javascript in the 90's vs. today).

So the modern situation is server=cloud and client=browser. This creates a demand for people who understand how software is built/deployed/maintained in this environment.

So we slap the Devops label on it and pretend we understand what's going on.

But it's really a debate about how long the current status quo will last before it's subsumed by something else.

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#165

Post by _betty_ »

wyclif wrote: post #144
sunaurus wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that "DevOps" is one of those terms that can mean whatever the user wants it to mean (like "agile" and "REST" and so on), but at least with DevOps, I've mostly only seen 2 types of common definitions: 1) "DevOps teams" are just rebranded operations teams 2) "DevOps teams" are teams that are responsible for both development and operations for their app I think the first one is the one you're frustrated with, an…

I always understood DevOps as a methodology, not a job title. Apparently, a lot of people think it's wrong to look at it the way I do.

I'd view it as a culture instead of methodology, but I think that's compatible with your view and option #2 from poster above.

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#166

Post by eternalban »

scarface74 wrote: post #41
eternalban wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DevOps is blue collar work. Software Engineering used to be white collar work. Think boiler room vs drafting room.

How is Devops "blue collar work"? Provisioning servers, databases, load balancers, etc and other resources use to involve someone driving down to the colo and installing hardware. Often now, it's a yaml file you run through Cloud Formation. Devops is just as much development and software engineering when you are working in a cloud environment -- it's an API call.

I provided what is imo a very clear and apples-to-apples analogy there for you: Drafting room vs Boiler room. (Replaces guages with graphs of alerts and logs and you'll get the idea.)

Certainly, in other engineering fields, visits to the installation sites by (designing) engineers, or even running pilot programs to debug the system as designed and implemented is a norm. However, the notion that 'an engineers job is to be responsible for x-widget from design to operation' is entirely foreign to any notion of "Engineering" that I am familiar with.

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#167

Post by scarface74 »

gerbilly wrote: post #160
scarface74 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re using Amazon as a glorified colo, you’ve got the worse of both worlds. You’re spending more on infrastructure and you’re not taking advantage of managed services to decrease the time and staff you spend on babysitting infrastructure. There is a lot more to AWS than VMs.

I see, so I'm doing it wrong you say? But I never said I was using Amazon. I'm using an internal cloud service at my company. It does not offer any managed services. Also when I do use AWS for clients, I _sometimes_ use managed services¹, but most of those lock you in to Amazon. Some clients don't care, some do. They are paying, so I don't care either way. In either case, I spend very little time babysitting infrastr…

Sure, managed services make things easier, but they also make your sysadmin muscles weak.

I want my sysadmin muscles to be weak. I’m not saying that sysadmin isn’t important, but why spend time managing servers and doing the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” instead of adding value and dealing more with strategy?

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#168

Post by irrational »

alchemism wrote: post #163
dogprez wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is lost on me too. ~15 years professional experience as a software developer and I never had to deal with an "Operations" team. My understanding is that it's the people that would be doing Amazon's job if you were trying to not use AWS or some other cloud service? "Devops" means not fighting with those people??? haha

I take it you’ve never worked in any of the Fortune 500, then.

I work for a Fortune 150, but I’ve never worked with a operations, devops, etc. team.

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#169

Post by scarface74 »

eternalban wrote: post #166
scarface74 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Devops "blue collar work"? Provisioning servers, databases, load balancers, etc and other resources use to involve someone driving down to the colo and installing hardware. Often now, it's a yaml file you run through Cloud Formation. Devops is just as much development and software engineering when you are working in a cloud environment -- it's an API call.

I provided what is imo a very clear and apples-to-apples analogy there for you: Drafting room vs Boiler room. (Replaces guages with graphs of alerts and logs and you'll get the idea.) Certainly, in other engineering fields, visits to the installation sites by (designing) engineers, or even running pilot programs to debug the system as designed and implemented is a norm. However, the notion that 'an engineers job is t…

It’s a poor “senior” software engineer who doesn’t understand anything about the underlying architecture or how to at least troubleshoot the infrastructure and have at least some type of understanding of the ops part.

How many hardware based Kickstarter projects have failed because they didn’t understand the complexity of actually manufacturing there product at scale.

It’s analogous to software engineers who don’t appreciate ops. Writing software for a company is useless if you can’t ship it or deploy it. You can’t imagine the number of bright eyed bushy tailed “software engineers” I’ve dealt with that thought they were smart because they knew leetCode and learned algorithms who couldn’t troubleshoot performance issues or understand why they couldn’t get shipping products because they didn’t understand the ops side of things.

Of course I am not diminishing the role of software engineering, I’ve been developing software actively professionally or as a hobby for over 30 years. But, I know enough in theory to talk to the ops guys for on prem/colo/hybrid architectures and I could easily be competitive on the ops side for jobs dealing with fully “cloud native” solutions for a small to medium size implementation.

Re: DevOps didn’t exist when I started as a developer

#170

Post by eternalban »

scarface74 wrote: post #169
eternalban wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I provided what is imo a very clear and apples-to-apples analogy there for you: Drafting room vs Boiler room. (Replaces guages with graphs of alerts and logs and you'll get the idea.) Certainly, in other engineering fields, visits to the installation sites by (designing) engineers, or even running pilot programs to debug the system as designed and implemented is a norm. However, the notion that 'an engineers job is t…

It’s a poor “senior” software engineer who doesn’t understand anything about the underlying architecture or how to at least troubleshoot the infrastructure and have at least some type of understanding of the ops part. How many hardware based Kickstarter projects have failed because they didn’t understand the complexity of actually manufacturing there product at scale. It’s analogous to software engineers who don’t ap…

It would be a poor architect that didn't understand anything about building technology, but that doesn't require spending time laying bricks as a laborer.

I think you are missing the point.

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